Know where I can pick up an imagination cheap?

According to W.P. Kinsella, "Writing is ability, imagination, passion, and stamina. Ability is being able to write complete sentences with clear, straightforward, standard English, which eliminates 70% of everyone who wants to write. Imagination is having a story to tell, which eliminates another 20%..." I made it into the top 30% -- woohoo. I am seriously screwed.

I attended my first fiction writing class last night which I enjoyed in a licking a 9-volt battery kind of way. My classmates are very smart, very articulate, and very talented (the bastards). We were given a sheet of paper printed with several first lines from short stories and told to pick two lines that appealed to us. The two I chose were: "Understand that your cat is a whore and cannot help you," and "Early in the morning on the first anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke." We were then told to write a paragraph using one of the sentences we chose as the first line and the other choice as the last line. Fuck me. Okay fine, I somehow managed to slap some bullshit between those two sentences in a somewhat coherent manner. I even had time to revise because other students were taking a lot of time with this. The professor finally called time and asked if anyone would like to read their paragraphs. You betcha! Those students that wrote for so long -- effing brilliant. Made what I wrote look like "Dick, Jane, and Sally had a wreck and hate their cat, Spot. The end."

We have until September 18th (3 weeks) to turn in our first story. Two students turned their's in last night, of course. I've begun four stories; does that count?